Soft Machine: A Personable Interface

The man-computer interface has evolved from the teletypewriter to workstations that accomplish a spatial metaphor for data management. In the experimental system described here, speech and graphics techniques are used to produce an interface in the form of a metaphorical person. Interaction takes the form of an unconstrained spoken conversation with a graphical robot whose animated likeness is displayed on a high-resolution computer graphics display. This system is proposed as a prototype of a “casual interface” for machines which we do not use often enough to justify learning a command syntax. The realization of such systems assumes the development of limitedvocabulary speaker-independent continuous speech recognizers. The system architecture, performance and assumptions are discussed